1812 was a year of turning points.

It was  the year that Spencer Perceval was murdered, the only British Prime Minister to have met such a fate, and his successor Lord Liverpool was appointed.

Just a tad more significantly, it was also the year when Napoleon, sick of seeing his anti-British blockade, the Continental System, being undermined by nations ostensibly part of it, decided to invade territory belonging to two of them. The first was Sweden. The second, far more dangerously - for him as it turned out - was Russia. He won battles during his march to Moscow, but his retreat from that city has become a byword for military catastrophe. It wiped out the colossal and highly effective army he'd built.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Europe, Wellington saw the tide turn in his favour in the Peninsular War against the French in Spain. Not, as we discover, that there was much that was glorious about that war.

After the defeat in Russia, France found itself facing another Coalition, the Sixth. It proved too powerful for him. Russians, Austrians and Prussians arrived in France from the East. Wellington with his British, Spanish and Portuguese troops arrived from the Southwest. Napoleon was forced to abdicate and went into exile on the island of Elba, off the coast of Italy.

It was peace at last. Though not for Britain. That crucial year of 1812 had seen it embroiled in another war in parallel to the one in Europe. But that's the subject of the next episode.

Illustration: Retreat from Moscow by Franciszek Kostrzewski, 1854. Public domain

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License